I’d love to hear more about how day-to-day operations under NixOS work for you. Functional management seems like one of the most radical rethinks of “systems” in a long time; but also, unlike many such radical changes, one that could be really broadly useful.

I worked on osxmonad but backing X11 into Quartz Compositor is pretty bad. I started working on https://github.com/puffnfresh/iridium which abstracts away window management and has a partial Cocoa backend. I want to start an X11 one now.

Amethyst is alright but there’s no scripting, no custom layouts, can be buggy and sometimes just stops working.

Nice timing. I’m on about year 4 (or is it 5?) of Arch + xmonad. I’ve always used Thinkpads, so there haven’t been any hardware support issues, but I do miss the OS X + Macbook battery life and it seems my wifi is always more spotty than coworkers/family using the same networks on a Mac.

I was considering switching back to a Mac recently, hoping that one of the tiling “WMs” on OS X was decent these days. Are they all bad? I assume I’d just ran an Arch VM for actual development needs and use OS X as a “skin with good battery life” + iTerm (to the VM). Am I crazy?

None of the alternate window management add-ons on OS X are really worth a damn. They really can’t be, because they always end up fighting the platform. This doesn’t bother me, but if you’re looking for something like ion but able to control native windows, you’re going to be disappointed. I use Optimal Layout, which allows me to easily resize windows, but it’s a far cry from when I used to use FreeBSD and X-Windows.

I have a rMBP, but I’ve never given up Linux. Thing is, I find it perfectly alright to use cloud instances whenever I need Linux functionality. I always have a few lying around that I can ssh to for what I need. That has worked for me, and often has been much better. On Google Compute Engine, my instances have a very flexible relationship to their disks, and I mix and match things all the time. It’s extraordinarily convenient, especially for the type of work I do.

A new job requires me to use a MBP and it’s been very frustrating for me as a very long-time (over 10 years) ion (now notion) user and as an Arch user. I will think hard about taking another job in the future that won’t let me provide my own tools. Yeah, it’s nice to have wifi just work, but for development, the window management feels like slogging through quicksand, and homebrew … well, I don’t want to criticize homebrew too much, I am very glad to have it and it’s far better than nothing, but it doesn’t hold a candle to any real package management system that is integrated with the OS.

I played with Amethyst but it didn’t seem especially useful. I spend most of my time in a full-screen iTerm with tmux and/or Emacs approximating some kind of tiling. It’s livable but not great.